My paternal grandpa didn’t much care for one of his granddaughters because she was “big as a dining room table” but he would’ve moved to Missouri with the neighbor down the road for once delivering him a basket of oatmeal-raisin cookies. Outsiders who met my grandpa considered him a nice old man with wild stories of being a ranch hand in Wyoming. I helped him put down some of his stories a few years before he died. There were historic facts like the early death of his brother who was struck by lightning while riding a horse to the post office and then there were events I recognized from old John Wayne westerns. The movie memories unnerved me in their vividness compared to the real life he’d lived for very nearly one hundred years. There was grandpa telling me all about bad guys and bunkhouses and shotguns with no mentions of being a husband or a father or how he imagined the grown up face of the toddler daughter who died.
The last time I saw my grandpa he was barely there mentally with no recollection of who I was but it cut little as he never tried to know me before anyway. We lived in a trailer court together in Wyoming when I was a kid. Grandpa talked a lot about his own toughness while grandma taught me how to read by flash cards and helped me plant hollyhock seeds and took me to yard sales in her giant brown Oldsmobile with signal lights that dinged as loud as the car was big. Grandma gave me dollars for helping her clean out her trailers between renters and let me read the Agatha Christie mysteries she bought at garage sales two for a nickel. Grandpa beat on his white husky and tied her up against her wishes until the sad dog broke away too late for the puppies that’d starved out back in a weedy old shed. He said he didn’t want no puppies anyway. He said he didn’t want no dog when Samantha the husky disappeared soon after.
The older my dad gets the more like my grandpa he becomes. Or, more accurately, the more I realize how much they were always alike. It's scary clear to me in this old picture of my mom and dad on a rare family hike.
